Please read the safety note at the end of this post before deciding to make this recipe.

Chow Chow (also known as picalilli) is a tart green relish common in Maritime Nova Scotia. Recipes are shared within families but often guarded beyond that as each family protects it’s ‘secret formula.’

I didn’t can salsa for most of my adult life. It’s not that I don’t like salsa – it’s one of my favourite foods. I didn’t make it because canned salsa was mostly runny, watery and liquid – and that’s not salsa to me.

If you’re canning salsa, there’s 3 absolute tips that I recommend for the best results:

I love fig jam. It’s sweet, has an awesome mouthfeel and it’s skins and seeds add a combination of textures that keep each bite interesting.

Honey provides the sweetness for this jam; and it’s plenty sweet. It will be served with cheese boards (specifically with old, hard cheeses) and it’s sweetness will be easily cut with the fat of the cheese and the crunch of a thin cracker. I’m particularly excited about eating these around a fireplace on a chilly winter night….

We’ve started to preserve our first batches by canning beans on the weekend!

We love dilly beans – they are a summer tradition around here. Because they are low-acid, beans are preserved by either pickling them or pressure canning them. These pickles are tangy, have a bit of a spicy kick (though you can skip that), crunchy and packed with dill flavor.

My introduction to tomato jam came from the amazing site, Food in Jars. Marisa is an inspiration to this entire community and her recipe is somewhat legendary within canning circles. My interpretation is a bit sweeter than hers (it’s missing some of the savory notes) and the consistency is very different (though it’s still thick like a jam) as the technique varies far from hers. If you’re considering making this recipe, be sure to check hers out to see which is more likely to suit your palette.

I’ve been meaning to make ketchup for the last few years and finally got around to it this year. I wasn’t sure where to start so I asked our Facebook group for recommendations. A bunch of links came in and I checked them all out.

The decision was a little overwhelming; trying to compare a bunch of different recipes to each other using only a smart phone while sitting in the parking lot of a farm isn’t the ideal method of choosing a recipe. So I cheated: I picked a recipe written by Local Kitchen because I’ve made a bunch of Kaela’s recipes and always had fantastic experiences with them. Her recipe is titled classic tomato ketchup and while my recipe is very similar (I share it because it is altered and the technique varies significantly), and I really recommend you check hers out as well, especially if you’re looking for the ‘authentic’ ketchup experience!

We’ll be posting our method of making ketchup later this week but wanted to dedicate a single post to checking consistency – this is the make-it-or-break-it test for most homemade ketchup. It’s also the stage where a lot of homemade ketchup falter as some are barely thicker than soup. If you like thin ketchup, that’s not a problem – but if you want a thick condiment, it can be disappointing to find out (too late to do anything) that you’ve made ketchup-sauce.

Dana and I have been part of an all-girls brunch league for years. It’s a collection of female friends who used to brunch monthly and now it’s somewhat random and more loosely defined (i.e. brunch may include dinner and a bucket of wine). I am indeed the only male member of said all-female group and we have a lot of fun together.

The five of us were having lunch three years ago when I noticed the pub we were dining at had preserves on a high shelf. As I scanned the shelf, my first observation was on the huge amount of dust covering the bottles; this was a short-lived observation as my eyes reached the end of the shelf and they fell upon a jar of glowing red orbs that were lit by the sun like they were some secret treasure fit for Indiana Jones. I had discovered the Cherry Hot Pepper: